Dr Simon Reads...

  Cash is one of those artists where you kind of know what you’re going to get. A voice like a man who has drunk all of the bourbon, singing country songs about a hard life and an easy death. Having written Folsom Prison Blues (“ I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die ”), Cash was keen to actually play in the prison itself, and here, after dragging himself out of addiction and getting a new manager willing to take the risk, he does just that, accompanied by June Carter on a couple of songs (including a rip-roaring version of their famous duet Jackson). Plenty of songs about prison life (The Wall, Green Green Grass of Home) but a few comic turns as well like Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog and the blackly comic 25 Minutes to Go where a condemned man counts down the minutes before his execution. Although he’s The Man in Black singing songs about prison, death, and murder, Cash has a wry sense of humour in the between-songs banter, and there are some interesting bits of prison life r...

  The Zombies are one of those bands where the name belies the kind of music they play. Named after flesh-eating undead, this album starts off with chirpy pop songs instead (see also Massive Attack, Savage Garden, and The Killers for bands with violent names and safe music). And the tracks aren’t bad, having something a bit more like Herman’s Hermits made a refreshing change from the experimental psychedelia and art-house stuff we’ve had recently. When some of the slower tracks started and there was some flute, I was worried we were back to Haight-Ashbury hippy noodlings, but thankfully not. We’re about as dangerous as Sgt. Pepper here. There’s a dip into folkiness with the anti-war Butcher’s Tale, which with its accordion accompaniment sounds more like Spiers and Boden/Bellowhead, and then the album finishes with the probably the most famous track, the almost impossibly laid-back Time of the Season. I think I first heard this as part of a film soundtrack – 1969, maybe. Anyway, t...

Paul and Art give us what we expect from them. There are some well-known tracks on here – America, Mrs Robinson, A Hazy Shade of Winter, and The Zoo. America once again shows Paul Simon’s combination of hope and melancholy, the young lovers taking a long-distance bus ride and laughing and joking, but then the singer also feels a sense of alienation (I’ve always assumed it was at a point in the journey where Kathy and everybody else on the bus is asleep, and he’s watching empty lands pass by in darkness). This track is followed by one called Overs, in which a couple have “ laughed all of their laughs ”, and it kind of feels like it is Kathy and the narrator from the last track, stuck in later life. I wish that I hadn’t looked this album up before listening (I normally research after listening to avoid prejudice), because I now don’t know if I would have spotted that the first half (doesn’t work to call it “Side 1” when streaming) between the Bookends tracks tells of stages of a life –...

  Here’s another album that belies expectations. Walker, ex of The Walker Brothers, sings songs that in his vocal style, and backing arrangement, feel a bit Andy Williams, a bit Englebert Humperdinck. But on closer inspection, the lyrics are quite dark, delving into a world of prostitution, drugs, and isolation. A couple of the songs I know as covers by other people, and it turns out they, in turn, are Walker’s interpretations of Jacques Brel songs. Jackie, which I’m most familiar with the Marc Almond cover, dreams of a louche and decadent libertine lifestyle where the singer can be “ cute, in a stupid-ass way ”. Next (best known to me from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band version) tells of the regimented and perfunctory experience of a “ mobile army whorehouse ”. The final Brel song, The Girls and the Dogs, is a comic turn about the difference between the changeability of women versus the reliability of dogs (and yet, at the end, the songs points out that it’s the dog that will ...

  Another album where the cover and title deceived me. I was expecting maybe a return to country music, but this is more avant-garde, early prog stuff (labelled on Wikipedia as acid folk). The Minotaur’s Song answers the never-asked question of what it would be like if Gilbert and Sullivan dropped acid (“ I’m the original discriminating buffalo-man/ I do what’s bad whenever I can ”). Other tracks are even stranger, wandering musings on life and spirituality, amoebas and water, played on a collection of odd assorted instruments among which are sitar, harpsichord, pan pipes and dulcimer. Lead singer and musician Robin Williamson (not to be confused with Robin Williams, but sharing a similar penchant for free-form maundering) has a bit of a droning, nasal voice which I found kind of wearing after a while; I think the songs might be better if sung by somebody else. It reminded me naggingly of somebody else, with Scottish chanted/spoken vocals over a harmonium, like a hippy Methodist ...

  From the album cover and the title, I was kind of expecting something folky, maybe a bit Joan Baez, a bit Joni Mitchell. What we actually get are some bright and breezy R&B tracks, with a few slow numbers (e.g. Lonely Women, Poverty Train), with some blues, soul, and jazz elements thrown in (when I came to proofread these I’d mistyped this as “jazzlements”, which also works). Often in the same song – Nyro likes a tempo change, but she makes them work. Several things stand out on further research – Nyro died far too young, aged 49. The whole album is an original composition. She worked with Barbara Streisand, was idolised by Elton John, and is claimed as an inspiration for artists such as Kate Bush and Tori Amos. To me, it sounded very close to Carole King, and Nyro’s biggest hit was with a King song. Her voice is gorgeous, although I’ve noticed that listening with ear-buds sometimes when female singers belt out the high notes it can be quite a painful experience. Fortunat...

  Whenever this list hands me a group I’ve never heard of, I always go into it wondering why they are included – is it the first instance of a particular genre, perhaps? Or did a young future superstar sing backing vocals? Sometimes they seem to be put in as an exemplar of a particular musical sound of the time. This one is very much an encapsulation of the late Sixties San Francisco sound, and since the opening track, The American Metaphysical Circus, is a blend of calliope and marching music played over the top of each other, coming off the back of Zappa’s The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny, another noise collision, I was worried it was going to be entirely terrible prog nonsense throughout, but then it turns into the track Hard Coming Love, with vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz sounding like a more melodic Grace Slick. It turns out that the reason this album was included was because of its heavy use of electronic instrumentation. Sometimes this is obvious, other times less so....

Although I do like Frank Zappa, I have to say that sometimes his humour gets a bit grating; it’s like early Steve Martin stand-up, or Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In, too knowingly “zany” (cue *Honk* *Cuckoo* *Swanee-whistle* sound effects, mugging at the camera, etc.) Zappa is at his best when he’s not trying to make the songs sound weird, but just lets the lyrics carry the message instead. With this album, the Mothers skewer the hippy culture, from the naivete of thinking that prancing around Haight-Ashbury in a kaftan will bring about world peace, through bourgeois “weekend hippies”, to the corporations cashing in with commercialised psychedelia. And at its best, with tracks like Absolutely Free and Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, it works as a nicely cynical antidote to all of the Summer of Love stuff. Other times, what we get are just soundscapes of noise, like The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny or Nasal Retentive Calliope Music, which take the kind of Syd Barratt sound ...

  No longer attached to Nico or Andy Warhol, the Velvets are free to create an album with a much more grungy sound throughout. Having gone through so many prior albums, I can see how the tracks on here take elements from folk (the repeating musical motif with storytelling overlaid) and jazz (free-form improvisation away from the main motif), but rather than clean-sounding nylon-stringed acoustic guitar or brushed drums and double bass, here the music of the tracks is fuzzed and distorted to within an inch of its life, feedback screams, and the backing is a pounding industrial wasteland of dirty noise. The title track suggests the rush from drugs, The Gift is a spoken word story told over music, of an obsessive man posting himself to the object of his unwanted affections, Lady Godiva’s Surgery is a similar concept but more musical, of a nightmarish possibly gender-reassignment surgery – the band, and Lou Reed especially, were inspired by William Burroughs, and there’s a Burroughs-...

I think on the last Aretha Franklin album I said that she set the bar for all other female soul vocalists to aspire to. Here, I think she takes that bar and puts it just a little bit further out of reach (contemporaneously, though, I’d say RAYE and Lady Blackbird are taking it turns to vault over that bar). Overall this album is bit more funky than the last one, with more energetic and fewer soulful tracks, such as the glorious Chain of Fools or the lively Niki Hoeky. That’s not to say that there aren’t some slow numbers as well, not least of which is a cover of People Get Ready, but the gold standard from this album has to be the soaring Goffin-King composition You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman. I want to know what that walk down the stairs of the scale is called in music theory – I wanted to say it’s “treppe”, but came up short. Anyway. That. You         Make              ...

How do I classify this? Voodoo Jazz? Creole Funk? New Orleans Blues? Dr John is a stage persona of New Orleans-born musician Mac Rebennack, and this whole album feels like a kind of voodoo ceremony. As Dr John, Rebennack growls and whispers entreatments in Creole, invoking the Lwa and selling us gris-gris and potions. The music oftentimes becomes an extended funky jam with shrieks and wild drumming mixed in, particularly Croker Courtbullion and I Walked On Golden Splinters, which become almost trance-like in their sounds. I loved it, this is definitely one that I’d return to, it’s so unlike anything else. My one complaint would be that the mix is very unbalanced at times. Because I’m currently listening on one ear-bud, I wondered if it had been mixed in hard stereo and the bits that were quiet for me were actually meant for the other ear, but when I put it through the car speakers, it turns out, no some bits are mixed very quietly. Take the track Danse Kalinda Da Boom; there are back...

I’d not heard of Blue Cheer, but they’re one of those bands that went on for decades with a rotating door of personnel, according to Wikipedia. My first thoughts on hearing this album were that they listened to the Jimi Hendrix Experience and thought “Nah, that sound just isn’t dirty enough.” The second was that their opening cover of Eddie Cochrane’s Summertime Blues is surely the birth of heavy metal. And then I went and did the research, and found I was right both times. Blue Cheer cut themselves down to a “power trio” of guitar, bass, and drums, the same as the Hendrix Experience, but for this album they amped up the grunge, fuzzing and distorting everything. Vocalist Dickie Peterson has a raw rock scream of a voice, and perhaps they got overlooked because they fall somewhere in the overlap between Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Still, like the Monks and The Sonics before them, Blue Cheer are very different to the hippy stuff surrounding them (and it probably comes as no surprise ...

  I’m not sure why Dimery has such a thing for The Byrds; this album is fine, but doesn’t feel particularly historic or notable. It’s The Byrds doing what they do, some San Francisco Sixties folk-rock, in particularly melodic and harmonic form. A couple of tracks have country elements – Change Is Now flits between C&W and more psychedelic sounds, while Old John Robertson is pretty much a bit of hoedown. There are space-rock flights, such as the Hawkwind-esque Space Odyssey, and some anti-war sentiment in Draft Morning. On the extended version, there is a track called Moog Raga, which is just that, an Indian raga piece but the “sitar” and “tabla” are actually electronic sounds on a Moog synth, and it’s really in the “so bad it’s good” territory. Coming in after The Call of the Valley, the electronica is no substitute for real instruments. And this, I think, is where this album fits into history, since it is pretty much the first to feature the Moog synthesiser. There’s also a ...

  This one is listed as released in 1967, but everything I’ve read about it suggests 1968, so I’m splitting the difference. It’s a piece of Indian classical music, mainly traditional but using the non-traditional instruments of guitar and flute, and like the Ravi Shankar album involves using the ragas as its basis. It tells the story, in music form, of a day in the life of a shepherd and his love, the shepherd represented by the guitar and the woman by the santoor, a kind of dulcimer, so the sound is different to Shankar’s sitar playing yet distinctly Indian. Meanwhile, the flute and the tablas play tunes based on traditional elements to signify the time of day, and the ongoing action, such as it is. Hey, we did Peter and the Wolf to death at school, I’m familiar with instrument motifs representing characters. I think I probably missed some of this since it is recorded in stereo and I’m currently missing one ear-pod, so some of the spatial transitions that are supposed to be prese...

  Back when I was listening to Getz/Gilberto I noted that the best tracks were the ones where Astrud Gilberto was singing. Now we get a whole album of her. Will it be like when you find that your favourite sweet from a selection box is available solo, but somehow it just isn’t the same without the others to highlight it? Fortunately not, in my opinion. It’s all very bouyant and bouncy, mostly samba and bossa nova based, part from the fun march Parade. The title track, Beach Samba, has Gilberto la-la-ing along to the music rather than singing words, and to me wouldn’t be out of place (nor would the whole album) in the soundtrack of a film, say, a romantic comedy caper set in San Tropez starring Peter Sellers and Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s a jewel thief, and Sellers plays two roles – a shy awkward Englishman who gets mixed up in Hepburn’s attempts to steal a diamond and they end up together at the end, and a suave and haughty rich Frenchman who owns the diamond. You thought my Sinat...

  If you know any Leonard Cohen song, you kind of know them all. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but I don’t think he ever deviates much from poetic lyrics over a fairly simple folk-tune style motif. Young Cohen here has a much smoother voice with a higher range than the more gravelly tones of later Cohen, and some of the songs, notably the track So Long, Marianne, are surprisingy tuneful. Again, I don’t mean that in a bad way. Cohen’s lyrics are often poetic to the point of opacity, more about evoking a certain feeling than directly meaning something. Take the refrain from the classic Suzanne on this album - “ for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind ”. It speaks to desire, perhaps unrequited or unspoken, or to a kind of mutual kinship that surpasses words, or perhaps Suzanne finds the intelligence or compassion of “you” to be an attractive factor. Or all, or none. Now imagine pretty much every line of a song being like that, and you can see why for the m...

  Apparently the working title for this album was “Sodding About”, which it largely is; The Who in a playful mode with the kind of whimsical vignettes that you’d associate with The Kinks, and what The Beatles were playing with at the time. It’s kind of a concept album, with the tracks interspersed with jingles for the pirate radio station Radio London jingles (which are fake, apparently, but sound an awful lot like those still in use by Radio London alumnus Tony Blackburn). Around the time I was listening to this was the time that another former pirate radio DJ, Johnnie Walker, announced his retirement, although he was with Radio Caroline. Also while I was listening to this on earpods, I walked past a For Sale board for Entwistle Estates; probably no relation. Anyway.... Some of the tracks are pitched as fake adverts, for Heinz Baked Beans, the anti-acne Medac, or the ballad Odorono where a young starlet doesn’t fall prey to the casting couch because she doesn’t use the deodorant...

  Considering none of the tracks on here are ones that I recognise from the hits and Best of...s, this is an extremely strong album where Hendrix and co. massively   raise their game in terms of songwriting and sound palette sophistication. Although there are some tracks, like Spanish Castle Magic, that evoke the prior album of distortion and wall of heavy sound, others are more delicate and nuanced. Little Wing features glockenspiel elements, while She’s So Fine features bass player Noel Redding on lead vocals and is a more poppy sounding affair. I thought there was use of wah-wah pedal as well, but apparently Hendrix played through a rotating Leslie speaker (the characteristic of a Hammond organ), which took me down a rabbit hole looking at when various pedals and effects came about, because that plays a large part in the distinctive sounds of a particular era. The Crybaby Wah-wah appears around now (late Sixties), but is more associated with the funk sound which I think...

  The Seventies feel continues, as Eric Clapton develops his sound from the bluesy work done with John Mayall to using distortion, overdrive, and a bit of wah-wah, combined with drummer Ginger Baker (probably the inspiration behind Animal from The Muppets with his frenetic drumming and difficult behaviour). Strange Brew and Sunshine of Your Love are the tracks that get the airplay, and they by-and-large exemplify what to expect from this album. Emerging out of psychedelia and blues, this is more purely (hard-ish) rock, apart from the pub singalong of an old music hall song, Mother’s Lament (“My baby ‘as gorn dahn the plug’ole”) where I expected John Gorman of The Scaffold to make an appearance. It’s good without being brilliant, but part of that I think is how familiar a lot of it feels compared to how it was at the time - I had a "Best of Eric Clapton" compilation many years ago that featured these tracks. Cream are billed as a “supergroup”, and it’s been my experience wit...

I mentioned in my brief discussion on Buffalo Springfield’s album that things were starting to sound more Seventies than Sixties, and this album is another step towards the pleasantly unchallenging guitar-based toolings of the likes of The Eagles. Vaguely folk-rock, mainly because acoustic guitars still appear, but the specifics of folk and country aren’t really present. This is a step on the evolutionary chain, and I think in part due to band member Arthur Lee’s growing disillusionment with the Flower Power movement. I can understand that – a burst of optimism in the “Summer of Love” that peace and love will prevail, and there are still civil rights riots, war in Vietnam, Six Day War and so on. There was one single released from this album - Alone Again Or - which to me sounds like it has Spanish flamenco inspiration but is apparently based on a piece of music by Provofiev. There are more classical and flamenco guitar elements that appear elsewhere on the album. Alone Again Or is pr...

  Well done, if you're reading this, on making it to the hundredth album. As I've mentioned a few times prior, feel free to comment with your experiences or opinions on any of the albums on this list. Although this is a Nico solo album, there’s a lot of involvement from her former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale, who wrote some of the tracks (arguably the best ones) and play backing. Nico apparently wanted drums, of which there are none, and hated that the arrangers added strings and flute overdubs to her recording. I’m kind of inclined to agree with her on this, the strings and flute make the music softer and a little bit bland, her raw (and sometimes a bit flat, to be honest) voice was better suited with the Velvet Underground sound, the overdubs want to turn her into an Ella Fitzgerald kind of vocalist, and she’s not. The first two tracks – The Fairest Of The Season and These Days are pretty good, sounding a little like a Nick Drake with their opening...

  This is a bit of a mixed bag, musically speaking. My original notes called it fairly Seventies-style polished country-rock, but there’s more to it than that. Given that the band features Stephen Stills and Neil Young, both of whom we will hear more of later, and how Stills moves towards the adult-oriented country rock while Young fluctuates between folk and grunge, it’s probably no surprise that it should be so. Reading the production history of this album, it’s one of those where each member almost did their own thing and then glued it together at the end, and pretty much anything with Neil Young involved seems to be feature him being an awkward nugget. He’s still doing it as I write, blowing hot and cold over playing Glastonbury 2025. The Neil Young songs are pretty obvious once you’ve heard some of his other stuff, and the wandering acid guitar is already prevalent, if not quite as sketchy and grungy as he will later do with Crazy Horse. Mr Soul is a little like the Rolling ...

Jumping from the sublime and haunting music of Buckley to the jaunty music-hall whimsy of the Kinks feels almost sacriligeous, but one soon gets dragged in. Compared to the previous Kinks album, this one heads more into the little vignettes of life and different characters (a bit like the way some Beatles songs are heading). Thus we get the singer’s jealously of golden-boy David Watts, the classic paeon to Waterloo Sunset and young lovers Terry and Julie, the sibling rivalry of Two Sisters, the Dylan-esque parade of circus characters in Death of a Clown. The music runs through a range of styles too, again with a bit of a music-hall feel. The jaunty Twenties jazz stylings of End of the Season, for example, or Harry Rag, which has a march tempo, but feels like a sea shanty despite being about a collection of characters consoling themselves with a cigarette – needs some accordion in there. It’s not as hard and rocky as prior Kinks outings, the overall soundscape is comprised of more d...

  Sort of similar to Donovan, but to my mind just a bit more sophisticated and complex in the songs. I’d heard Pleasant Street used as a background tune (in Channel 4's student comedy Fresh Meat) and hunted it down because it’s fab, and also came across Song To The Siren (not on this album) but for some reason evaded really going down the Buckley rabbit hole. Like Donovan, there are some troubador ballad songs, especially the title track Goodbye and Hello, which with it’s tempo changes throughout and references to kings, jesters, machine guns etc. feels like an early prog-rock tune. Pleasant Street is still one of the better tunes on the album, really showcasing Buckley’s vocal range, but the opener No Man Can Find The War is a barnstorming anti-war polemic, while I found Once I Was, a relatively short piece about a former love, to be profoundly beautiful. I had to look it up, because musically it’s a simple piece, doing the old 4-chord trick (Using chords based on the 1 st , 3 r...

  The third studio album from Donovan Leitch, and a movement into a more psychedelic rock sound. Donovan was friends with The Beatles and Brian Jones, somewhere on this album there may be Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones playing, he wrote one track (Fat Angel) for Mama Cass Elliott, another for Bert Jansch (Bert’s Blues) and namechecks Dylan, Janis [Joplin] and Jefferson Airplane in Fat Angel, and it seems like he was everywhere in the British and Californian music scenes of the time. There are essentially three types of track on this album; some troubadour/chanson ballads, usually featuring wizards and queens and knights (e.g. Legend of a Girl Child Linda, and Guinevere), or they’re more upbeat, genre-defying mixes of psychedelia, folk and rock, often with quite a funky tempo. The title track is a good example of this form, as is The Trip and what is probably my favourite track from the album, Season of The Witch. The timbre of Donovan’s voice is not so good for carrying the bal...

  Seeing this coming up, I had in my head for some reason that it was Saucerful of Secrets and that Dimery was skipping the debut album, the only one to feature the ill-fated Syd Barrett. But my mistake, this is the first Pink Floyd album released, but probably not the last on the list. This early Floyd is a different animal(s) from what they will become; here the psychedelia is ramped up to full. Other albums on this list so far, especially for 1966-7, belong within the psychedelia genre, but other than a bit of backwards overdub on Sergeant Pepper, none have really come close to sounding like an acid trip. Here the Floyd take us into some very wierd soundscapes. I described the track Help I’m a Rock from the Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! as sounding like jazz if the solo instrument was animal noises; here, Pink Floyd go further with a track like Interstellar Overdrive, which starts off a bit like some Hawkwind space rock but devolves into sound effects and general strange...

A San Francisco band named after an 18 th century English dandy, this is their fourth studio album and by this time they were reduced to a trio, hence the name of the album I guess. The music is a country rock/beat pop/psychedelia crossover that has a lot of variety to the style of the songs. Some tracks, such as Triangle or the Randy Newman cover Old Kentucky Home are in much more of a country style, while It Won’t Get Better is much more laid-back and bluesy. Are You Happy Now is a bit of lively folk/pop while Only Dreaming Now slows things down and brings in a bit of gypsy accordion. More psychedelic elements (inevitably for 1967) occur in the longer tracks (most of the tracks on here are of the two-and-a-bit minutes of the classic pop sing), with The Painter of Women being a bit baroque with harpsichord, and its parade of archetypal characters is both very Dylanesque and also prefigures elements of prog. The Keeper of Time manages somehow to sound like a mix of a lushly orches...

  The Young Rascals are included, I think, as an exemplar of the “blue-eyed soul” genre; soul music played by white people, in other words. Imagine if The Monkees played covers of Dusty Springfield songs, and that’s kind of what we get here. Some tracks, such as A Girl Like You and I’m So Happy Now are upbeat, punctuated by horns, very poppy soul, sounding a little like Happy Together by The Turtles, while others are slower, like Find Somebody and How Can I be Sure?, but still souful. And, actually, what I said in the opening paragraph is reversed, as it was Springfield who did a cover of How Can I Be Sure. It also sounds like Cilla Black could have sung it, with its waltz beat and traces of French accordian. Bits and bobs of other musical influences can be found as well – Sueno uses Spanish guitar, while the title track Groovin’ uses laid-back Latin beats. If you’ve heard any tracks off this album, chances are that it’s Groovin’, which was one of the Rascals’ biggest hits. The...

  Beefheart, real name Don van Vliet, is known to me as being somewhat Zappa-like (he and Zappa work together quite a lot), but this, his debut album, starts off fairly straightforward, with the hard rock/blues Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do, then onto more psychedelia rock with Zig Zag Wanderer and Call on Me. There’s more blues in Plastic Factory and Where There’s Woman. Since the album features a young Ry Cooder it’s perhaps not surprising that there are a lot of blues. Dropout Boogie is much more like a Zappa track, a chant-like exaggerated vocal over a mix of hard grind and twinkly breaks. Like Zappa, it’s fundamentally a good tune that kind of satirises itself by going over the top – Beefheart has a slightly quavery voice like he’s putting on a silly voice, but I think this is his natural singing voice. As does I’m Glad, which is a kind of slow rock and roll/soul number. Electricity is a fun track featuring a theramin, and here Beefheart’s tight-throat vocals really work with the...

  The next batch of albums feature three artists I’ve never heard of, and one that I have heard *of* but (aside from a collaboration with Frank Zappa), I’ve never heard (Captain Beefheart). But first, Moby Grape, part of the San Francisco sound, and maybe a little like Jefferson Airplane in sound, but more towards country rock and less psychedelic. And they’re good, by gum, when they’re good. I’m picking up a bit of Wishbone Ash as well, which is unsurprising perhaps as both groups have multiple inter-weaving lead guitars. Maybe a little like another overlooked group, Fanny (yes, British readers, that was their name). The trajectory of Moby Grape is a sad one, because they could have been much bigger than they were, could easily have been a familiar name like many of the other groups arising from the Summer of Love. But they were beset with mental illness, legal and money problems, lengthy disputes with a grasping manager, but they somehow limped on into the start of the twenty...